Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

If kakoune sparks your interest, you might also want to check out Helix, a new editor inspired by Kakoune in some parts

FWIW:

I tried Helix maybe about 6 months ago. It was pretty good, but there were things I do regularly in vim that I couldn't do in Helix, and the obvious way to do it in Helix didn't work (but it did in Kakoune when I tried that).

I mentioned this on whatever chat was listed on Helix's website as the place to go, and everyone there was open to making the obvious thing work, so I'm guessing Helix will get there at some point, but I don't want to use it now. Certainly given the relative momentum of the two projects Helix should get there some day.

Discussed a few times:

More hindsight on Vim, helix and kakoune - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066347 - May 2023 (1 comment)

Helix 23.03 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384691 - March 2023 (93 comments)

Helix 22.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890655 - Dec 2022 (40 comments)

Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494840 - Nov 2022 (166 comments)

Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33147270 - Oct 2022 (306 comments)

Helix: A post-modern text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039390 - Sept 2022 (2 comments)

Helix, Terminal Modal Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847041 - March 2022 (2 comments)

Helix 0.5 released (Kakoune like terminal text editor) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043889 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)

Helix: a post-modern modal text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 - June 2021 (365 comments)

Helix is awesome but have been disappointed by the core devs stance toward integrating some form of copilot. It's really difficult to use an editor that doesn't support it at this point.

What stance is that? Last I checked they were still figuring out how to extend the editor in general.

Reading this thread, I really like the idea of an IPC mechanism like Kakoune uses (and Neovim has IIRC)

If this were the case, integrating copilot or other ao tools would become pretty straightforward!

Yeah, that's basically the case. They don't have a plugin system, afaik it's still in the planning phase. They have LSP support, but copilot is a non-standard kind of LSP, and last time I looked the devs weren't interested in doing the integration work needed to get it all working nicely.

Can't say I blame them, it's their project after all. Just frustrating because I would totally use helix if not for the lack of that one feature. I actually still use it, but just as a quick way to make edits in the CLI, and not for full time dev. It's a great editor and project nonetheless.

Came to post this myself. What I love about Helix is that it just works out of the box. Install your toolchain and LSP and off you go. I absolutely do not want to have to write my own Vim config, or install some tool that configures a ton of stuff I don't understand.

What does Helix do that Kakoune doesn't?

From: https://helix-editor.com/

> Mainly by having more things built-in. Kakoune is composable by design, relying on external tooling to manage splits and provide language server support. Helix instead chooses to integrate more. We also use tree-sitter for highlighting and code analysis.

Here's a good comparison of the two. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976369

A prominent Kakoune contributor wrote up a great blog post exploring that question here: https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune

I switched from Kakoune to Helix after using Kakoune for a few years. Helix, to me, is everything i loved about Kakoune but with better defaults. It being in a language i love also is fun, as i almost immediately forked it and changed a few things - handy when they're still figuring out plugins.

Works on Windows

Reply on news.ycombinator.com